today’s fish

so we went to oosaka with the intention of visiting “one of the largest aquariums in the world”. it was pretty nice, with the main exhibition being the huge pacific ocean display in the middle of the 7 storey building, surrounded by a lot of smaller exhibitions from all over the world.

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i kind of compiled all the video footage i took and put it on gen’s space to try and own his bandwidth :p – take a look if you have a bit of spare bandwidth and time.

there was everything from dolphins to sea otters to jellyfish, and also a really cool gift shop at the end. there are these really nice pillows all over japan with a substance inside that feels reeeaaaallly soft and nice… i really want to get one sometime. they were shaped as dolphins and other sea creatures in thsi case, but i didn’t end up buying one mainly because the ones they had were quite dirty from all the kids passing by having a rub.

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we ended up eating kfc after ds was attracted to the store and wouldnt leave. i think the 11 secret ingredients didn’t quite make it through the translation to japanese correctly. not that it didn’t taste good… it was just different. not to mention the stingy chip servings (about 10 chips ^^;). if i had to say something good about it, it did taste healthier – my twister had beans and other stuff inside.

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mmm, the bakeries in japan are just too good. i can’t resist when i see one. soo much bread in my stomach .

today’s photos

so we ventured off to nara today to visit the deer park and surrounding temples. little did we expect it to poor with rain . we still made the most of it – paying excessive fees to explore ancient temples, observing that the huge temple reconstruction is STILL going on (it has been every time i’ve visited japan) but it now has a finish date of 2010! yay.

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darksith got uberowned by a deer – you have to watch this

dinner was nice, with a healthy katsudon followed by cream purin! we also ate some mister donuts today. what a healthy day

photos of stuff

and so we set off for kyoto. by quite an expensive 2 hour 45 minute shinkansen trip (13,500yen or so). what is there to say? we’re staying at the place i stayed 2 years ago called j-hoppers, which is a kind of up-market guest house. there are about 5 other people sharing this room with us, but they all keep coming and going every couple of minutes so i can’t really get a number in my head…

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i kind of planned to go around the city and see some of the temples before we settled down for this night, but once we got our vaios out and started haxing, it was already 9pm ^^;;;;;;; after a few days without some solid computing time, it really does add up. it seems ds finally got around to updating his blog too :p

ramen for dinner, tasty… until i got out the door and realised my tongue was fucking BURNT >< instant thought was get a drink, so a trip to the conbini later i had a mitsuya grape soda. now let me tell you – mitsuya is no ordinary soda… it has about 5x the carbonation factor. this resulted in a sensation that was somewhere between pain and pins and needles in my tongue gg me.

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yesterday while on the train, there was this middle aged lady with some kind of mental problem. unfortunately i was sitting right in front of her… she started kicking me and hissing pretty close to my face. my first thought was to tell her to fsck off, but as my vaio was in a very vulnerable location on my lap, i refrained from doing that incase she turned agro on me. someone next to her eventually said to get off the train, so she did. she kept muttering things about her family, and wanting to be taken to the police, and lots of yen and a whole stream of random complaints that made very little sense. i was tired from lack of sleep the night before, so i just 1/2 slept through it ^^;

tomorrow we’re off to nara (assuming i can find the right train to take) to HEADSHOT some deer.

photos

i’m kinda running behind schedule when it comes to blog posts, so let me attempt to catch up tonight :p

so the vaios arrived. we went to akira’s house to collect them, and spent a bit of time there playing around. mine came with a broken xp install that wouldn’t boot (thanks, sony) and no recovery cds.

that didn’t really concern me – i got straight to opening it up to upgrade the ram and hdd. ram was simple, but hdd ended in a mess that involved taking apart most of the computer, and almost breaking it in the process. 2 hours later though, i had a working 7200rpm 100gb hitachi hdd.

of course, getting windows installed was another issue. i formatted 4 times over last night, resulting in very little sleep. the drivers sony provided were a bit dodgy, so i had to try a few times using both a clean xp install and the sony recovery dvds we created to get it right.

its all good now, and this machine is simply awesome to use . i can’t say too much about it yet since i’ve only been practically using it for a couple of hours so far. the key pitch is slightly wider than pbook and most laptop keyboards, but that should become natural after a while.

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